Aung San Suu Kyi Losing Lustre at Home?

IndiaTimes

March 11, 2013

YANGON: She endured years of house arrest and was steadfast as her political movement was decimated and her colleagues tortured. But now, as the leader of Myanmar's opposition in Parliament, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace laureate, is courting her former jailers.

With Myanmar sloughing off the legacy of five decades of brutal military dictatorship, the country is witnessing a political minuet becorusetween the army and Suu Kyi, the human rights champion turned politician who is fighting to keep her disorganized and fractious political party relevant and her path to the presidency open.

To her critics, Suu Kyi's compromises are tarnishing her status as a near saint. She has been quiet about the military's bloody campaign against an armed ethnic minority group and recently went so far as to say she was "very fond" of the military, rattling some of her extremely loyal party members.

The remarks were tied to the army's role in liberating the country from colonial rule, but the timing, coming as the military was pounding the rebels with airstrikes, rankled supporters who were under military rule for decades.

"To the outside world, nothing has really changed with her; she is Suu Kyi and all the beautiful things that go with it," said Josef Silverstein, an expert in Burmese politics and professor emeritus at Rutgers. But "she is essentially making herself irrelevant. We have not heard Suu Kyi talk as Suu Kyi."

Making the transition from dissident to politician was never going to be easy in an impoverished country perennially divided by ethnic conflict. The path from icon to leader, successfully navigated by Nelson Mandela of South Africa and few others, is fraught in a country like Myanmar, which fought a civil war in 1948 that lives on in ethnic insurgencies and allowed the military an outsize role that still continues.

The reverence for Suu Kyi inside Myanmar is difficult to overstate. Her sacrifices for her country are legend: she chose to stay in Myanmar even as her husband was dying abroad, fearing the military leaders who kept her under arrest would not allow her to return to her struggling nation. Her grace under duress helped win her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, which she was only able to pick up last year after the generals decided to begin a shift to democracy.

But the adulation for her has set a particularly high standard, and her stature has intimidated members of her party from challenging her views. Even party members say their National League for Democracy is suffering from an array of problems including what one called a "leadership vacuum" in the middle ranks. Nobody dares to speak out in front of Aung San Suu Kyi, and that is a very bad thing," said Win Tin, a senior party member. "It's not out of fear; it's out of admiration."

Supporters note that Suu Kyi is making a careful calculation in allying with the former generals who run the country. The political reality is that the military still wields enormous power.